| Borough | Avg MPH |
|---|---|
| Bronx | 8.1 |
| Brooklyn | 7.8 |
| Manhattan | 5.9 |
| Queens | 9.5 |
| Staten Island | 16.0 |
Table 1
Introduction
New Yorkers spend an enormous amount of our lives in transit. We define ourselves by the transit lines that we and our neighbors take together. We bond over complaints about the quality of service and the likelihood of improvements. We come to know the enormity of the city, and ourselves as part of that enormity, as we learn to pilot our way through it on bicycle, bus, train, or on foot. On the days that old train cars are retired thousands gather to join them on their last run. Transit is vitally important the world over, but perhaps nowhere is the transit system as much a part of our understanding of ourselves as it is in New York. The strands of this system that we use, day in and day out, are the foundations of a community as surely as are our shared streets, parks, grocery stores, and restaurants.
Unfortunately, not all of these transit communities are treated equally. New Yorkers who rely on city buses for their transportation needs suffer through long wait times and irregular service only to board the slowest buses of any city in the United States. Table 1 displays the average city bus speed by borough in September 2022. This community faces an unjust inequality in service compared to those who can spend the entity of their commutes on the subway. This inequality is unsurprisingly connected to others. Lower-income New Yorkers, immigrants, and New Yorkers of color are the city’s most frequent bus riders. This paper will argue that due to the fundamental inequality in transit service, and because this inequality is connected to others that riders face, that bus riders constitute a community of interest in need of political protection during the process of redistricting. Further, it will argue that because the Supreme Court has become increasingly hostile to uses of race and ethnicity to define communities of interest, that using transit to define a community of interest offers a model of how policy issues with coalitional potential could be used to define community elsewhere. The paper will first lay out the case for transit to be seen as a critical policy issue. It will then explore the demographic characteristics of New York City’s bus riders. It will then turn to the public testimony given to the City’s redistricting commission to explore how New Yorkers use transit to define their own communities. With this understanding of transit in mind it will then turn to some of the core policy issues these communities might unite around, and what broader coalitional potential those policy issues might have. Finally, it will discuss the process of drawing a city council map with the transit underserved in mind and reflect on how this community is treated by the new city council map.
Why Transit?
Lack of access to fast, reliable transit is more than an issue of convenience. The amount of time spent riding and waiting for transit has profound consequences in terms of racial and economic equality. In his posthumously published essay “A Testament of Hope” Martin Luther King Jr. chose to highlight transit inequity as a key driver of urban racial inequality. “Urban transit systems in most American cities, for example, have become a genuine civil rights issue” he wrote, “because the layout of rapid-transit systems determines the accessibility of jobs to the black community. If transportation systems in American cities could be laid out so as to provide an opportunity for poor people to get meaningful employment, then they could begin to move into the mainstream of American life” (King 1969). The problem King is describing is essentially what scholars of transit access have termed the “spatial mismatch hypothesis,” the straightforward idea that, as a result of multiple interlocking patterns of discriminations, jobs exist in places that unemployed populations do not live (John F. Kain 1968; 1992; Blumenberg and Manville 2004; Brandtner, Lunn, and Young 2019).
Though much of the research on spatial mismatch has concentrated on automobile commute times there is a literature that has explored the effect of transit access on employment opportunity. Thomas Sanchez evaluated the impact of a census block group’s distance from rail and bus stops on the number of weeks worked in a year in Portland and Atlanta. Sanchez found that distance from a bus stop in particular had a strong and significant relationship to weeks worked on all populations in Atlanta and all white populations in Portland (the null nonwhite findings in Portland may be attributable to the small size of that population) (Sanchez 1998). Sanchez’s findings are intriguing, but they fail to account for the potentially endogenous relationship between transit locations and employment. Attempting to remedy this Justin Tyndall uses the exogenous shock of hurricane Sandy to measure the effect of resulting transit closures on employment. He finds that, while unemployment rates were declining across the city in the year after the hurricane, they increased in areas in which the R train, whose interborough service was temporarily shuttered, was the primary means of commuting to Manhattan (Tyndal 2018). These two studies are part of a larger, globe spanning literature on the interaction of transit availability and economic justice which argue that transit has a measurable effect on a community’s economic opportunity, and therefore communities who have poor access to transit have at least one common source of immiseration (Barton and Gibbons 2017; Glaeser, Kahn, and Rappaport 2008; Liu and Bardaka 2021; Sanchez 1999; 2008; DeGuzman, Merwin, and Bourguignon 2013; McKenzie 2013). Time spent in transit is much more than an issue of convenience, it has material impacts on peoples’ lives and we should therefore be interested in who is being forced to spend the most time in transit and what can be done about it.
Who Rides the Bus?
Bus riders are a diverse group. Ridership is highest in some of the wealthiest and whitest census tracts of the Upper East Side and in some of the poorest of The Bronx. Despite this heterogeneity, some trends stand out. To explore these demographic trends, we will turn to three sources of data. First to census tract level data from the 5-year American Community Survey which will paint a general demographic picture. Second to individual-level data from the 5-year PUMS to get a more detailed picture of who is riding the bus. Finally, to data from the DOT’s Community Mobility Survey to look at the routes most bus riders are taking.
Map 1 below displays bus ridership by census tracts, as well as the position of subway stops and the city’s slowest bus lines. Demographic information for each census tract is available by clicking on it. The map suggests that the highest densities of riders are located in pockets of the city not served well by the subway, particularly in the Western Bronx, Eastern Queens, and Staten Island.